Roaming Profiles

[Neville]

We have roaming profiles enabled, with a quota set whenever a student logs on and reaches that profile size it doesent let them log off.

 

Whenever this happens I check the profile of the user and it looks like they are saving pictures in my pictures folder I remove all the pictures and move them to their personal drive.

 

However when they log back on the same message appears again is this because they are using roaming profiles and each time they log onto another machine it is using the cached profile instead of the roaming.

 

Also what is the best way to stop this from happening.

 

Also is it a better idea to give student man profiles instead of roaming because also it takes a long time to log them on and for them to log off.

[elsiegee40]

So we have a Staff share and a Pupil year group shares and the Home Drive is redirected there

 

On the profile tab of the User properties in Active Directory we Connect

U: to \\servername\\share name$\\%username%

 

I'm a little confused by

I remove all the pictures and move them to their personal drive.

 

Where are they saving them in the first place?

[Neville]

If check where there roaming profile is stored and go into that profile and look at my pictures that is what I am talking about.

 

As we have GPO that dosent let them save to my documents or pictures but when they right click it saves the pictures.

[Pete10141748]

You can try deleting all the temporary files, thats worked for us here before.

 

Shortly after though we did away with quotas, they were just getting annoying

 

All our pupils have .man profiles (one login for each class by class name), and save their work in a mapped drive at "\\server\work\pupils\%classname%"

 

That way, they can't add things to the desktop, change settings, delete things etc. as no changes are saved back to the server.

 

 

If you want logon times to improve, you coud also re-direct the start menu (I haven't done this myself, but I've seen it montioned many times before around here).

[elsiegee40]

We use a single mandatory profile for all pupils, but they all have their own home drives for storing their work - defined in AD as above. Nobody can access anyone else's work.

 

Neville, do they need right click for anything else? If not, you could disable it in Group Policy.

[Ryan]

However when they log back on the same message appears again is this because they are using roaming profiles and each time they log onto another machine it is using the cached profile instead of the roaming.

I get intermittent problems with this too. 'Pain in the arse' is an understatement. Them having roaming profiles isn't too much of an issue, as i don't mind them customising their environment to a degree (certain things obv. locked up tight). Would deleting the local profile each logoff help this? Profiles are limited to 150MB and we don't have loads of kids, so copying lots of profiles isn't too much of a worry.

[srochford]

Are you redirecting "my documents" (and "my pictures")? If not, this is why it's defaulting to saving the pictures in the profile folder.

 

For students, we redirect the desktop (so that anyone who manages to save stuff there doesn't lose it at logoff!), redirect "my docs" to the home folder and have mandatory profiles.

 

For staff, we redirect the desktop, application data and my docs. We are just starting to use roaming profiles but because the "big" folders are redirected this doesn't adversely impact logon/off times (eg my profile is 12Mb of which 11Mb is ntuser.dat - which having just looked at it is pretty big!). The "local settings" folder won't roam by default so that saves space/time.

 

Staff profiles don't get stored on the same share as home folders etc - that way we can make the "right" folders available off-line (profile doesn't need to be - it's already on the C: drive)

[Neville]

So what would be the perfered way to do this.

 

Have all students with a mandadtory profile or a roaming profile.

[elsiegee40]

For students a single mandatory profile that they can all share is the most straightforward.

 

If the profile is mandatiory, nothing gets saved back to it when they log off, so it never grows.

 

Then in Active directory, make sure every student has their My Docs (Home Folder) redirected so that it is not in the profile. (see earlier post)

 

Wiki Link about Mandatory Profiles

http://edugeekwiki.rm-charlton.net/index.php/Mandatory_Profiles

Edited March 20, 2008 by elsiegee40

[powdarrmonkey]

If you redirect My Documents/My Pictures to somewhere useful then it doesn't make any difference whether you use a mandatory or roaming profile.

 

It's in Group Policy somewhere, if you can't find it I'll look for you tomorrow.